Thursday, August 31, 2017

Just as her murderous brother, Erik Prince, has a scheme to privatize the U. S. military, the criminally-ignorant crone, Betsy DeVos, is out to do the same for schooling from pre-K through college:

“I think that there’s been an outsized footprint in the last couple, three decades on the part of the federal government in education,” she said. “And it’s my goal to extract us from a lot of those spaces. I will welcome your thoughts on what we need to be doing less of. And if there are areas to be doing more of, what are those areas?”

Robert D. Skeels is a social justice writer, public education advocate, and immigrant rights activist. He lives, works, writes, and organizes in Los Angeles with his wife and cats. Robert holds a BA in Classical Civilization from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a JD from Peoples College of Law (PCL). A US Navy Veteran, he is a proud member of Veterans for Peace. A student of Liberation Theology and Paulo Freire's work, Robert devotes much time towards volunteer work for 12 step, church, homeless advocacy, and grassroots groups. Robert's articles and essays appear in publications including Jacobin, Truthout, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Schools Matter, Daily Censored, Regeneración, K12NN, LA Progressive, and The Los Angeles Daily News. In 2013 Robert ran for the LAUSD School Board against a billionaire funded corporate reform candidate, finishing second in a field of five, with over 5,200 votes.

BP: We're not opposed to charter schools. We have started charter schools, and we have members in charter schools. But charters need to have specific criteria. They need to be accountable, controlled by democratically elected boards, and have transparency. And –an important condition often overlooked – they need to be part of the system, not separate. They should be part of a system of education that makes sure every student gets what they need to thrive. We have examples of that.

Bryant does not ask about and Pringle does not volunteer info on specific examples. Why? Because if they exist, they are so rare as to be meaningless.

NOT among the criteria that Pringle says "charters need to have" are humane learning environments, non-penal instructional strategies, rich curriculums, professionally certified teachers and principals, librarians, counselors, or desegregated classrooms. Nor does she define in this interview or elsewhere what "accountability" or "transparency" mean.

The truth is that NEA only cares about expanding membership and collecting the dues that members pay each year, with the false hope of slowing the bleeding out of public schools and professional teaching. As long as NEA and AFT remain loyalists to the DNC's Clintonian contingent of paternalistic corporate reformers, every teacher should boycott these core agencies of corporate enabling.

Friday, August 25, 2017

Under the misdirection of Commissioner Candice McQueen, the TN state legislature recently passed a sweeping new charter law that is aimed to expand the footprint and to give more public money to the charter industry's corporate welfare reform schools. And money is not the only thing that Dr. McQueen is offering charter corporations like Green Dot and KIPP.

With the passage of the new state law this summer, predatory charter chains may now demand student directory information on each public school child. This information may then be used to decide which children's homes that charter operators will flood with slick school marketing brochures that conceal the dehumanizing environments of these "no excuses" institutions for cultural sterilization.

Parents, however, can say no to such requests by contacting their public schools and requesting that their children be excluded from these data sweeps by the charter industry:

Shelby County Schools is required to send a notice to parents at the beginning of each school year about how student information is used. Parents have the option to leave their contact information out of the student directory, or other such lists.

Or, you can write a letter requesting that your student’s directory information remain private. Write to either of the addresses below:

Meanwhile, the leaders of these dehumanizing and exploitative hell schools pay themselves very well, even though these child centers for paternalistic brainwashing are advertised as "non-profit." Oligarchs like Eli Broad amass huge tax savings for donations to these racist outfits, while leaders amass personal fortunes for exploiting the poor:

Friday, August 11, 2017

Last October the NAACP
passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on the approval of new charter
schools. The resolution did nothing for the millions of segregated
children already suffering in the penal no excuses charters that no NAACP Board
member would ever allow for his or her own children, but it was a decision
that, nonetheless, freaked out the multi-billion dollar charter industry and
the abusive, well-paid overseers who run the charter reform
schools.As a result of NAACP call for a moratorium
last fall, the billionaires went to work to put pressure on the NAACP to
recant. The NAACP, an organization largely dependent upon the generosity
of corporate foundations, the philanthrocapitalists, and their corporate
unions, caved to the pressure. Less than a year after the squeeze began,
members of the NAACP
Board issued a report that ignores the moratorium by making recommendations
for how new charters are to approved. The report provides a clear signal that
the moratorium is now irrelevant.
The NAACP report won the praise of the DNC/AFT/NEA/NPE. As schoolmarm to
the nation's neoliberals, Diane Ravitch went so far as put the NAACP in her
blog's Honor Roll.
On August 8, Ravitch took the opportunity to praise once again the new NAACP
position, which mirrors the AFT/NEA/NPE position on charters. Here are
the two NAACP points regarding charters that Ravitch posted on her blog:

4. Mandate a rigorous [charter]
authorizing and renewal process. States with the fewest authorizers have the
best charters. Only local school districts should be allowed to authorize
charters, based on their needs.

. . . .

5. Eliminate for-profit charter
schools and for-profit charter management companies that control nonprofit
charters. Not a dollar of federal, state or local money should go to for-profit
charters. The report notes that the widespread reports of misconduct of
for-profit charters and their for-profit managers is reason enough to forbid
them. As for-profits, they have an “inherent conflict of interest,” and may
well put the interest of their investors over those of students.

-->

Ravitch then asks: Now, I ask you, what
part of these five recommendations suggests that the NAACP is wrong? That it
was doing the bidding of teachers’ unions?"

The second part of your question I will answer
with a question: Does anyone believe that it's a coincidence that the NAACP
position on charters now mirrors the AFT/NEA/NPE position? Or is the
NAACP seeking refuge inside the DNC education tent? Can they afford to
support a moratorium that the DNC, which still run by the Clintonians, is not
supporting?

As to why the NAACP/NEA/AFT/NPE position is
wrong: As I have noted most recently, putting local boards in charge of
deciding which charter chain gangs get approval does nothing to staunch the
flow of education dollars into the pockets of charter operators. It just makes
local boards complicit in the corruption.

And as for the weak call to eliminate for-profit
charters, here's what I said about that a couple
of weeks ago:

-->

. . . the majority of charters have always been of the
“non-profit” variety, with only 13
percent of the nation’s 7,500 charters run by for-profit companies.
Insisting that all charters become “non-profit” will only guarantee that that
state and local education dollars will continue to fill the coffers of the
charter industry, which thrives by claiming “non-profit” status for their
segregated cultural sterilization schools based on the KIPP Model.

Which, of course, is the final and most
egregious "wrong" associated with the NAACP position: it ignores the
damage being done to children in the neo-eugenic psychological neutering camps
that are the chosen solution to controlling the urban poor.

Friday, August 04, 2017

As the Muncie, Indiana, privatized school bus fiasco deepens, parents
protest at bus stops, kids get lost on buses on the way home, 911 calls are
made, buses never show up or are late, school gets cancelled for days because
of the chaos, and the Indiana Department of Education steps
in to help clean up the mess, the local community needs to know there were many
red flags before Muncie school officials signed the $1.4
million contract with Auxilio bus services, a private company now located
in Lansing, Michigan.

Besides the numerous 2012 troubling news reports out of Michigan on how
Auxilio handled school service, an 84-page report, which surfaced in late
February 2017, a few weeks before the Muncie school board vote, outlines the troubles
parents and community members in Monroe County, Indiana, feared Auxilio would
bring to their school district. Although
there appears to be a lot more to the story than just Auxilio, the private
company’s past troubles, arrogance, and secrecy should be known.

KID INTO THE BUS WINDOW

In 2012 in Michigan’s Galesburg-Augusta school district, parents, too,
protested the Auxilio takeover of bus transportation, after a student
videotaped an Auxilio “on-site manager,” Heidi Mullin,
“roughly pushing a 7-year-old into a bus window.”

Since many instances
with the 7-year old and other children on the bus had been reported and Auxilio
had “assigned a new driver and a new bus aide to no avail,”Mullin’s job was to ride on the bus “to assess
the problems and figure out a strategy for resolution.”

Mullin was fired, after the video made its rounds on Facebook, but questions
about her hiring led to even more questions. After a freedom of information act request,
news reporters found that Mullin resigned from a previous job
at Portage Public Schools “six months after signing a ‘last-chance agreement’
following a string of written reprimands and unpaid suspensions.” According to a change-of-status form, Mullin was "not eligible to be rehired by Portage Public Schools." On her Portage job application, too, Mullin claims she was fired from B&B Trucking in Kalamazoo because "they didn't think I had the right attitude to drive (a) truck."

When asked about the hire, at first Auxilio’s CEO Ed Dollin told MLive, a media group with 10 newspaper
locations in Michigan, that "We screened
her very well”but later admitted, according to MLive, “that Mullin's
background check did not include talking to Mullin's previous supervisor.”He claimed, too, MLive writes, that “the information
obtained from Portage was limited to a form where a Portage human-resources
worker mistakenly checked a box indicating that Mullin had no record of
professional misconduct.”

At one point after the Mullin bus incident with the 7-year old, CEO Dollin said
that “I think right now we’re a
whipping boy.I think we’re being
vilified because we’re coming in to save money and we’re making changes.”

A group
of mothers, however, didn’t buy the argument and protested outside the “district’s
offices calling for the district to protect its students, telling Fox 17 TV that the privatization of the
district’s busing is at fault.” At a school board meeting, too, “Galesburg
residents questioned Auxilio's competency, citing numerous problems with
Auxilio's drivers and procedures.”

"IT'S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS"

Earlier in 2012, Galesburg-Augusta signed a $356,750 contract with the bus company,
although the school district’s supt., Tim Vagts, has admitted that “Auxilio's references
did not include any districts served by the firm since its formation in October
2011” and that he didn’t know any of the bus service’s other clients.Vagts said he recommended the bus company
because it was the lowest bidder, one of the same
reasons given by Muncie school officials.

According to MLive, at one point when
Auxilio CEO Dollin was asked about the company’s other clients, he said "It's
none
of your business."When reporter
Julie Mack looked into the Cincinnati address Auxilio had listed on its website,
she found that the address was in a redevelopment zone across from an adult
bookstore and was “actually the office
for the Midwest EB-5 Regional Center,
an organization that works with immigrants who want to start businesses in the
United States.”

During the Muncie school board vote in March, Central High School teacher
Allen Kidd also called “into question how little information is
included on Auxilio's website.”Auxilio CEO Dollin, in response, said that the company website was under construction and that
it has clients in eight Michigan districts and some Ohio private schools.

Currently,
as of August 3, 2017, Auxilio lists its address as Lansing, Michigan, on its
website.On its current and past clients
page, Auxilio has
written “Stay tuned for a full list of our clients!” and that testimonials are “Coming
Soon.”

WHERE ARE ALL THE BUS DRIVERS GOING?

In Muncie, the narrative explaining some of the school bus chaos is that a good-many bus drivers quit supposedly just before the school year began. A similar story was told by the Galesburg-Augusta district and Auxilio,
too.
According to MLive, there were no
drivers for special-ed children enrolled in summer programs.Dollin and supt. Vagts “blamed
the problem on Galesburg bus drivers who had promised to work for Auxilio and then
reneged at the last minute.”But
those drivers “say they were laid
off by the school district and had yet to receive a job offer as drivers for
Auxilio.”
Dollin later claimed that “he thought
Galesburg would keep the special-ed drivers on the district payroll for the
duration of the summer program and didn't find out otherwise until Aug. 1,
before Auxilio had finalized its hires.”

MONROE’S WARNING

When
Indiana’s Monroe County Community School Corporation hired Auxilio to do a third
of its bus routes because it was a low bidder, local parents and workers, in the introduction to an 84-page report entitled
“No to Auxilio, Yes to Our Community,” stated the
school board’s decision to hire Auxilio was “based on an incomplete, and in
some important ways misleading, information set.”

The
parents and workers claimed, among other things, that outsourced jobs could drain
money from the community, children’s safety could be compromised, and employees
who questioned decisions could possibly be fired.

The
“No to Auxilio” report authors also quote from The Independent, a local Michigan newspaper, about problems at the
Dundee Community high school where Auxilio does maintenance
work and bus transportation.

When
bathroom stalls were missing at the school, an Auxilio employee, worried about
school safety, “put in a maintenance work order for the stall doors in the
bathroom by the locker room to be replaced…., turned it into his immediate
Auxilio supervisor and the work was never done.”

Not
knowing if the maintenance department or school administrators received the
request, the Auxilio employee “posted a
picture of the stalls with doors missing to social media to draw more community
attention to the problem. Auxilio’s response to the post was to fire the employee.”

There
are many other issues Monroe County community members bring up in the “No to
Auxilio” report, including the fiasco at Galesburg-Augusta.

It
will be interesting to watch this disaster capitalism fiasco unfold in the upcoming
days and weeks.

A national expert on the corporate and theocratic assault against public education, Doug Martin is the author of Hoosier School Heist, the book which exposes the corruption, scandals, and campaign financing behind so-called school reform in Indiana and elsewhere. OrderHoosier School Heist and get the facts.

Thursday, August 03, 2017

As journo-author of numerous pieces in her series, "Educational History for Dummies Who Want to Remain That Way," Dana Goldstein has another gem of a piece in the New York Times, where she regularly brings to light the corporate education perspective on education issues.

This time Goldstein brings her corporate lens to examine the problem of bad writing among school children, and it takes just a few five-sentence paragraphs for Goldstein to get to the root cause of the massive deficiency:

The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves. According to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a scan of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs turned up little evidence that the teaching of writing was being covered in a widespread or systematic way.

First off, I would ask Ms. Goldstein what Kate Walsh's perspective has to do with the perspective of educators, since Walsh has never been a teacher or studied education (this she has in common with Goldstein, who has a BA in European intellectual history). In fact, Walsh's corporate-funded business at NCTQ is based on pasting together spurious sponsored research into reports that place all the blame for learning shortcomings on teachers, schools, and teacher education programs.

What Goldstein and Walsh consider as the "root of the problem" is, instead, a symptom of old-growth policies by corporate reformers, the education industry, and conservative politicians, which have attempted to stunt the interpretive and expressive capabilities of children in favor of expanding the storage capacity of children's memory banks. The Business Roundtable's long-established and continuing test-based strategy of schooling by forced feeding and regurgitation has led to the preparation of generations of workers with strong abilities to be led by the hand (or the nose), to minimally comprehend, and to have the barest understanding of understanding. With today's new teachers having grown up with writing (and speaking) on the periphery with the rest of the non-tested non-essentials, writing and speaking stand the chance being replaced by what could be, I guess, an emoji-based system of communication.

Unfortunately, Goldstein ignores entirely the history of highly-leveraged attempts by CorpEd to eradicate federally-funded programs and teacher education curriculums that were not aimed directly to increase test scores. Goldstein does not mention that a number of states, including New York and Tennessee, now judge teacher education programs on how much graduates of those programs can increase test scores of their students. Any concern from Kate Walsh about that? Nah.

Today Goldstein is quick to praise the NWR, which she sees as a important tool toward the kind of "rigorous writing" agenda, which is now being demanded by the Business Roundtable's Common Corers. Until such time that Kate Walsh and her corporate foundation funders can come up with a lucrative scheme to standardize writing instruction in teacher education courses, Goldstein makes it clear that NWR will be an important technology in helping teachers and students, alike, to get in touch with their inner memoranda, as well as tapping into the wellsprings of inspiration for writing annual reports to the stockholders.

Wednesday, August 02, 2017

There appears to be some real confusion among what may be well-intentioned folks about what the NEA resolution on charter schools actually says about a moratorium. Here is the only mention of a moratorium in the document:

Unless both the basic safeguards and process detailed above are met, no charter school should be authorized and NEA will support state and local moratoriums on further charter authorizations in the school district.

As anyone can see, the National Education Association is NOT authorizing a moratorium in the event that all its fanciful desires are not met with regards to charter schools: the National Education Association is saying that it will support local and state affiliates that may choose to call for a moratorium. In other words, NEA plans to do nothing.

Nonetheless, I found this comment at a blog this morning, which claims that there is an NEA moratorium on charters in place:

The NEA resolution only calls for a “moratorium” on charter schools that don’t meet the standards they lay out, rather than a moratorium on all charter authorizations. . . .

This is just plain wrong, and it perpetuates the kind of corrupt dissembling that NEA lawyers used for years and have now exported to the NAACP and other organizations that have opposed charter expansion in the past.

Angela Duckworth and her "academic" mentor Martin Seligman helped develop torture models that the CIA uses in places like Iraq. The very same elements of these torture models were taken from Duckworth et al. to establish the horrific "no excuses" policies of corporate charter school chains like KIPP. Both Duckworth and Seligman are monsters, and that the corporate media continues to provide them a platform is a testament to the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideology. Dr. Jim Horn and others have written quite a lot about Duckworth and her ilk at SchoolsMatter.

Robert D. Skeels is a social justice writer, public education advocate, and immigrant rights activist. He lives, works, writes, and organizes in Los Angeles with his wife and cats. Robert holds a BA in Classical Civilization from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a JD from Peoples College of Law (PCL). A US Navy Veteran, he is a proud member of Veterans for Peace. A student of Liberation Theology and Paulo Freire's work, Robert devotes much time towards volunteer work for 12 step, church, homeless advocacy, and grassroots groups. Robert's articles and essays appear in publications including Jacobin, Truthout, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Schools Matter, Daily Censored, Regeneración, K12NN, LA Progressive, and The Los Angeles Daily News. In 2013 Robert ran for the LAUSD School Board against a billionaire funded corporate reform candidate, finishing second in a field of five, with over 5,200 votes.